All posts tagged ‘Taiwan’

From the outside, you wouldn’t know that there’s a game store in this office building.

If you happen to be visiting Taipei, you can take the subway to the Zhongxiao Fuxing Station and come out from Exit #1, across the street from the fancy SOGO department store (the newer one, not the older one just down the street near exits #3 and #4). On the corner of the busy intersection you’ll find a very tall rounded building which looks like a cross between an office building, a hotel, and a billboard, with an unobtrusive door tucked away next to what is currently an Esprit store.

Go inside and hop on the elevator to the ninth floor, where you will be greeted by a somewhat shabby, dimly lit hallway angling off to your left. At the end of the hall is a sign that reads “Alchemy 艾客米.”

The entrance to Alchemy games: a tiny door at the end of a dim hallway.

Through that door is a small room — probably smaller than my own basement, and most likely smaller than anything you’d think of as a hobby game store — crammed literally floor to ceiling with board games. There are a few very small tables to one side where you can play Magic, and the cash register (and a few more games) are squeezed into a space behind the stack of games. Welcome to Alchemy Games. Continue Reading “Hunting Down Tabletop Games in Taiwan” »

A big part of any trip to Taiwan is the food. Things just seem to taste better when you buy them from a little streetside cart late at night. Near our apartment are any number of little shops where we can buy yummy eats, and because of the exchange rate (~33RMB to 1USD), most of the time you can get a really good meal for about what you’d spend on your large soft drink at a typical fast food joint.
After the jump, a sampler of the foods we’ve enjoyed so far. Continue Reading “GeekDad Goes to Taiwan: Good Eats” »

I’m an ABC: American-Born Chinese, but my parents taught me and my siblings the language and as much of the culture as they could in the United States. I’m fluent but not really literate, and my knowledge of various festivals and holidays is mostly limited to the types of foods associated with each one. But I do strongly identify myself as being Chinese-American, and it’s really important to me to pass my cultural identity along to my own kids. The tricky thing is, my wife is Caucasian and only speaks a smidgen of Mandarin, and my kids are growing up in rural Kansas, which is not known for its abundance of Chinese folks. What’s a GeekDad to do? Continue Reading “GeekDad Goes to Taiwan: Bilingual Kids” »